Hollow plastic containers have long been produced by the blowing of an extruded tube captured between two mold halves. The captured, extruded tube will have a portion which extends out of the blow mold adjacent to the neck portion of the mold. When the blow pin is lowered through the neck portion of the mold into the extruded tube, the outside portion of the extruded tube is pinched between a cutter collar mounted above the blow pin and an anvil formed by the blow mold halves. This pinched-off portion is generally referred to as the neck moil. Blow air is introduced through the blow pin to inflate the captured tube to the shape of the mold halves. Cooling fluid is then passed through internal traces in the mold halves thereby cooling the blown container to insure that it is rigid enough to remove from the mold. The neck moil is not cooled and remains fairly soft and plastic. This moil must be removed from the completed container so that a commercially acceptable product is produced. Removal is conventionally achieved by engaging a rotation collar which fits about the cutter collar, with the moil so that the moil can be tightly gripped and rotated to shear it from the container. Since the pinching action between the cutter collar and the anvil does not always completely sever the moil from the container, oftentimes there is difficulty in effecting moil removal as the moil is not rigid enough to break cleanly from the container neck. Instead the soft moil is merely stretched and not removed resulting in a non-marketable bottle.
Therefore it is an object of this invention to provide a method and apparatus which is capable of separating a moil from a blown container without the risk of the container being ruined by faulty neck moil removal.